EDITOR — Social media was designed to bring people closer and keep each other up to date with what is going on in their lives.
It has come to my attention that recently, or l can just say for years now, this has not been the case.
In reality, people are becoming too dependent on social media, looking for attention and social interaction online rather than in the real world.
Honestly, I sometimes truly wish that tools such as the iPhone (or any smartphone), laptops, iPads or tablets hadn’t been invented.
Sure, they’re great, incredibly useful, and fun time-killers but the way teenagers abuse them, and turn them into mini social control rooms, is frankly awful.
With more teens and even children in elementary school obtaining social media accounts, we should have expected that a lot would become less social in the real world.
Children and young adults would rather keep up to date on their social media profiles instead of interacting and socialising with the people around them.
People may think about drugs and alcohol when they hear the word addiction but people can easily get addicted to social media.
These addicts have the constant need to update their statuses even on multiple social media platforms such as facebook, snapchat and twitter, to name a few.
Long ago, you would find that unity in a family would be created when folks could sit down and interact with their loved ones and catch up on their day-to-day events.
Gone are the days when parents or grandparents would spend time telling their children ngano or playing monopoly and also keeping each other up to date with what is going on in their lives.
But today, that is not the case. One would rather be on social media updating on his/her day to day events than talking to someone who is sitting beside him/her.
I thought social media was supposed to improve our lives but instead it has created a society which lacks emotional connection. It has also given licence to be hateful and also creating a skewed self-image.
Now Editor, I am not saying that social media should be avoided by the public, but people need to be aware of the cons of it.

Nqobile Sibanda,
Gweru